I've been digging into Noatikl today and it's fantastic. I'm now ready to import my own sounds and create patches. What is the best way to accomplish this? Is there a limitation on the duration of the sound?

Noatikl doesn't include any sound generators; Noatikl is a pure MIDI generation engine. That is to say, Noatikl generates MIDI events that are used to trigger sounds that are created by other software in your system.

On Windows, Noatikl will by default play sounds through the Microsoft software synthesizer that is built-in to Windows. On Mac, you have to do a little more work to play sounds through the software synthesizer that is built-in to Mac. But in general, once you've got Noatikl up-and-running, you'll want to play Noatikl through your very best synthesizers!

So, in order to use your own sounds, you'll need to send the output from Mixtikl into your favourite synthesizers.

The actual way you do this, differs very much depending on what desktop audio tool you use (e.g. Logic, Reaper etc.), and whether you're using Windows or Mac....

The note durations output by Noatikl are practically unlimited (in the case of Ambient voices). How good very long notes would sound, depends on your target synth.

Thanks for the quick reply. I am on a Windows XP machine. I typically use Cubase 2 or 3 and Ableton Live. What I would ultimately like to do, is bypass the Microsoft Wavetable Synth and you use my own audio interface. Perhaps this is unnecessary for this approach, but I'd like to generatively manipulate some of my existing audio tracks. Perhaps after converting these into midi files? Is this the correct approach? And if so, where does mixtikl come in, I haven't used this piece of software.

Well, the easiest place to start is follow one of our tutorial videos (you'll find these listed in the Noatikl help pages...) that show how Noatikl Standalone, or Noatikl VSTi, can be used to drive sounds in various audio host applications including Cubase. The videos can't cover all audio hosts - there are too many! - but hopefully will give you the information you need to get started. If you need more information, please have a look through the forums and feel free to ask the Noatikl community for tips.

I wouldn't worry about Mixtikl right now; it sounds like you just want to focus right now on bedding-down Noatikl into your existing tool chain and working with your current favourite synths!